FEB 15 | 6-9 | DRAPER, UT

It’s a 3-hour whirlwind workshop. Let’s get down to business and get you learning as much technique as possible to get you practicing and comfortable with pointed pen. It’s not that intimidating, but there is a learning curve. If you’re the type of person that needs adjustments with your grip and orientation and needs to see things in-person. This is the workshop for you. No experience necessary. Beginnermediate calligraphers welcome, too. Lefties ALWAYS welcome. Snacks, handouts and materials included.

MAR 2 | 5-8 | SLC, UT

We’ve teamed up with The Market Beautiful (formerly Vintage Whites) for another workshop at the Utah Fairgrounds. Come early and shop the awesome vintage/made goods and get your “learn on” as we dive deep into brush lettering. If you’re the kind of person that doesn’t have time for calligraphy, but you need calligraphy in your life, this is the class for you. Materials are portable to go where you go: practices, jet-setting, road trips, doc apts, school, etc. No experience necessary. Beginnermediate calligraphers welcome, too. Lefties ALWAYS WELCOME. Snacks, handouts and materials included.

Finally coming up to the surface after a very wonderful, but very busy holiday season. OH wow. It was great. My kids were spoiled, too. So, how do I include them in giving thanks for their massive haul of presents? They make the backgrounds and I make the cards out of them. It’s really quite easy. I made a video about it, but I’m sure you can figure it out on your own, though, too. ;)

No need to cut the papers down, give them to your kids and let them have fun! But not so much fun that they totally saturate the page with water and pigment. We need the paper to still have some integrity. So try (sometimes easier said than done) to pull the paper away and give them a new one to color once they have markings in all four quadrants of the page. Teach them how to splatter their paint (only if you have washable colors like crayola watercolors!).

Once you have a collection of pages from your kid(s), let the papers dry and cut the paper in fourths (5.5×4.25). Now add your Thank You phrase! You can write it by hand with marker or use a Thank You stamp (like this or this).

Now on the back, write your Thank You on the back on the left half of the paper. Be sure to leave room for your kid to make a mark, whether it’s a scribble or part of their name. Write the recipients address on the right half and stick a stamp in the top right corner. BOOM. DONE. Postcard postage is 34 cents now, so keep that in mind. :)

I hope you get your kids involved in expressing gratitude with us! Let me know how it goes by tagging me on Instagram @melissapher. And if you’re looking to learn how to do that fancy-pants calligraphy on the front of the card, look no further. I teach brush lettering with personal coaching (one-on-one feedback that’s actually helpful) over at calligraphy.org. Hope to see you over there!

I had the joy to design and letter the wedding invitations for one of my cousins this last August. They were dream clients, too. Both have amazing taste and trusted my expertise and let me play with some fun, new techniques.

I’ve really enjoyed playing around with watercolor pencils and the playfulness and depth they provide to a simple watercolor wash, so I mixed a few colors to get their wedding colors in the wash and went to town. See the below video for an in-depth explanation of how to get that wash. I love the energy that explodes from the background with those washes.

Check out the tutorial below and subscribe to my YouTube channel for more tutorials like this in the future!

We went with copper foil printing for the names on the invitation. Part of me wanted to do copper foil for all of the text, but I didn’t want readability to be an issue. We did digital printing with digital foil through a wholesale printer I have an account with, so it was quite affordable, too!

Man, foil is so hard to capture with a camera! It has a lovely rosy, rusty tone to it, it’s hard to see that in the images. But it popped nicely against the watercolor background.

For the design, I used my go-to font Museo Sans and my own hand-lettering. I lettered the names and titles of cards with my iPad Pro using Procreate and Brush #4 from Fabian Fischer’s ultimate calligraphy brush set. I really liked the texture and functionality of that brush more than any other brush I’ve found around. If you’ve found other good ones, let me know!

I ended up addressing all of the envelopes for the invitations as well. The couple gave me 100% creative freedom to pen them however worked best. I ended up doing a large-scale script for the names with an all caps for the address. I used the Cocoiro Brush Type marker (if you’re purchasing one for the first time, don’t forget to get a pen body to go with it). The markers lasted me about 75 invitations before it ran out of ink. I ended up doing between 500-600 envelopes. It was a project for sure, but I was THRILLED with the end result.

I’ve recreated the invitations using my ink-jet printer and laser printer and foil laminator so you can see some of the spots where the foil didn’t adhere. All details have been changed for privacy purposes.

I’ve had this thing in the queue too long! It’s no secret that I’m a materials hoarder. When I got the chance to score a set of General’s Kimberly Watercolor Pencils, I jumped at the chance. I tried watercolor pencils a long, long time ago (before I really even knew a thing about watercolor painting in general), and didn’t really do well with them. I needed to make up for lost time.

I love how I can get very gestural strokes with the watercolor pencils. It adds a lot of movement to the paper. I filmed a quick little tutorial on how to make your own ranunculus in the video below. I do hope you enjoy!

Add your own calligraphy to your florals, and you’ve got a VA-VA-VOOM piece that your friends and family will love! Don’t know calligraphy yet? Consider taking my online class. It’s THE BEST (if I do say so myself. ;)).

I’m a Christian, Celebrating Easter for me has become more and more about celebrating the life-teachings of Christ, with the added bonus of jelly beans.

I couldn’t let Easter pass by without making something for the season! I’ve been reflecting on the life of Christ and this scripture kept coming to me over and over again. So I put pen to paper (actual Apple Pencil to iPad) and made it happen.

I’ve formatted the printable quote to 8×10. I do hope you enjoy and remember Christ this Easter! He is our key to peace. I’m loving the focus on Christ with 8 principles of peace over on Mormon.org.

I do hope you take the time to print it out and display it somewhere. If you print it out, please leave a comment here or tag me @melissapher on instagram so I can see where you’ve displayed your scripture!

*By downloading the above material, you agree to terms of use: This tutorial/freebie is free for personal use and should not be distributed/republished without my consent. Altering any files is NOT ALLOWED. If you would like to use this freebie for commercial purposes, please email me. Thanks!